Vance notes that he was drawn to Catholicism for “intellectual reasons,” citing authors including “J. R. R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton, Saint Augustine, and Saint Thomas Aquinas” as well as C. S. Lewis. He spends a few pages discussing Pope Leo XIII, whose encyclical Rerum Novarum is, as Vance notes, “one of the foundational Catholic texts about political economy.” (The current pope took the name Leo to honor Leo XIII.) Yet apart from one extended quotation from Chesterton’s Everlasting Man, one extended quotation from Augustine, two passages from Rerum Novarum, and one passage from the twentieth-century Dominican priest — and Marxist — Herbert McCabe, Vance offers very little insight into the intellectual reasons for his conversion. There is no real engagement with theological or philosophical ideas that one would hope to find in a purported spiritual memoir.

Perhaps it is unfair to expect the vice president to enter into especially perceptive dialogues with Aquinas on truth, Augustine on love, Chesterton on paradox, and Tolkien on myth. But it is not unfair to expect a former senator and sitting vice president to describe how joining the Roman Catholic Church materially affected his political views and votes. Vance gestures at that question in the chapters “Of New Things” and “A Dismal Science.” The first is where he discusses Leo XIII. His account of the encyclical is reasonably competent, correctly noting that the encyclical “forcefully advocates for the rights of individual workers, for labor unions, and for traditional families — even presaging the ‘family wage’ that would later become a critical part of stable industrial societies.” Leo argued for the application of the Christian understanding of human beings as social creatures, bound by familial and community obligations, to the state’s obligations to its citizens.

Rerum Novarum should be read more widely by Catholics and non-Catholics alike, and leftists in the Western world would do well to enter into a fruitful dialogue with it and the tradition on which it draws. We could all learn much from Rerum Novarum and the series of encyclicals that were written in its wake. Important examples include Quadragesimo Anno (1931), Pacem in Terris (1963), Populorum Progressio (1967), Centesimus Annus (1991), Caritas in Veritate(2009), Fratelli Tutti (2020), and Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas (2026).

As you can imagine, there are innumerable resources from the twenty centuries of Christianity that lay out principles for thinking about human beings, political community, state power, allocation of resources, and the like. But imagine you must, because Vance doesn’t discuss the church’s reflection on these matters at all.

At the end of his chapter “When in Rome,” Vance asks, “What would a Christian approach not just to marriage and family, but to economics in the modern era look like?” In the following chapter, “A Dismal Science,” he lays out all the ways in which thinking about the human person solely as homo economicus falls short — which, as the kids say, fair — but offers no sustained reflection on the policies that would do justice to human beings as the social creatures that we are. As Vance notes, “An economy geared toward creation and dignity may very well produce more real prosperity than one geared toward finance and accumulation.” So far, so Leo XIII. But that is as far as Vance goes.

In fact, Vance’s political life is about as far from Leo’s vision as one can imagine. When former New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asked Vance on a podcast what policies marked the Trump administration as particularly Christian, he replied that the administration had lowered taxes.

The Trump administration clearly believes that an economy geared toward dignity involves lawless Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials terrorizing nuns on their way to Mass. Presumably, dignity must also involve bombing an Iranian school for girls.

If Vance believes that social media companies “bombard” children with “images and influences that have left them isolated, depressed, and increasingly at risk of self-harm,” what legal obligations should a government committed to human dignity impose on them? Vance leaves this question to the imagination. And whatever his lionizing of Rerum Novarum, Vance has done nothing as a senator or as the vice president to strengthen union membership in this country. He appears content to entirely disregard the encyclical’s robust defense of labor unions.

The great Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard says somewhere that Christian ethicists make it their job to tell people that what Jesus demands in the New Testament isn’t really a demand. Vance’s chapter “When in Rome” does much the same. To be clear, what the Holy See says as a state and diplomatic entity does not carry the same weight as the Gospel or centuries of Christian teaching. And when Vance says that he is “one Christian statesman who would welcome an institutional faith less focused on platitudes and more focused on reality,” I agree with him. But his book is nothing if not platitudinous.

Take, for instance, immigration. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, whatever its faults as an organization, is much more focused on the realities of immigration than J. D. Vance, Stephen Miller, and Tom Homan.

The sad thing is that Vance used to care about reality. In Hillbilly Elegy, he made the argument — controversial, to be sure, but it was a real argument — that the problems of the white working class were not reducible to economic decline alone but also resulted from family breakdown and destructive cultural habits. The book made him famous and arguably brought him to the Senate and the vice presidency. In a 2020 article for The Lamp magazine, Vance wrote “How I Joined the Resistance,” a moving account of his conversion to Catholicism and how his new faith recast his relationship with his family. If you are interested in Vance’s conversion, skip Communion and read that piece instead.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus says that he is “the way, the truth, and the life.” What exactly that means has taken up two thousand years of Christian reflection. I appreciate that Vance does not claim to be a theologian. He defends the rationality of Christian belief and practice, and he has kind words for Pope Francis, whom many so-called Christian conservatives did not like.

On the Christian account, the truth is always surprising and challenging. The idea that love sustains creation, and that love became incarnate in an itinerant Jewish preacher, is, if nothing else, interesting. It makes demands on its hearers. But the vice president has a complicated relationship with the truth. He infamously claimed that, if he had to make up stories about Haitian immigrants to get the attention of the mainstream media, he would. The Washington Post showed that he lied about the timing of his embrace of Trump.

In “How I Joined the Resistance,” Vance wrote, “I try to keep a little humility about how little I know, and how inadequate a Christian I really am.” And in Communion, he writes, “The Gospel is inherently an inconvenient message. It demands much of us — so much, in fact, that it tells us up front that every single living person will fail in some profound way.” Indeed.

At the heart of the Christian message is the idea that, in order to be yourself, you must love, and in order to love, you must tell the truth. The social order, as the Christian tradition from the New Testament through Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to Leo XIII and Leo XIV has insisted, must attend to people’s material and social needs so that they can love and tell the truth. The church is nothing other than the community of people helping one another to do that. Unfortunately for readers of Communion, the J. D. Vance of 2026 is much more comfortable with lying and being boring — which are two ways of saying the same thing — than the Vance of 2016 and 2020.